Tuesday 27 May 2008

The Knives Are Out

Apparently the correct way to a) deal with a dispute or b) settle a score with an individual/the society that has betrayed you is to stab someone. With 29 teenagers murdered in London alone this year, the press is covering the alarming rise of knife crime with typical sensationalising alacrity.

Some have already argued that the media's graphic reports of such incidents will only perpetuate the problem; that the articles somehow become self-fulfilling prophecies. This is not the case. With such thorough coverage, the media is not instigating the cause but reacting to the effect of knife crime. Such reporting is both moral and desirable. The public has a right to know what is going on and to choose to interpret whether or not it affects them.

When it comes to knife crime, there are two things that need scrutinising. Why do young people feel compelled to use a weapon on another - often unknown - individual? And what can be done to stop them?

An article in the Independent
interviews Camila Batmanghelidjh, who blames the spate of attacks on two factors. In a somewhat formulaic approach, she attests that, "social and emotional deprivation" + "the absence of a functioning parental figure"= inevitable crime.

Batmanghelidjh's initiative, Kids Company has opened, amongst others, a walk-in centre in Camberwell, where young, disaffected people can go and get an evening meal, shelter and varying degrees of psychotherapy. They are often victims of domestic violence and neglect. Although her intent may be laudable, the idea that these are the exact demographic who are killing fellow teenagers is not as axiomatic as Batmanghelidgh would like to think.

It is not always the case that a teenager who carries a knife is a victim of fragmented upbringing. And, since society is not always to blame for the woes of such individuals, it is not fair, nor even logical, that society has to feel their discontent.

People carry a knife for a number of reasons - protection, status, bravado. But they do not always do it because of an absent father or a drug-addicted mother.

Batmanghelidjh tells of such fear and defenselessness that the adoption of knives for many is the only option. But the attacks receiving such a frenzied media coverage are not acts of self-defence or (so far as we know) gang-related retribution. These are meaningless and erroneously challenged acts of cowardly violence. Youths who perpetrate such acts are bullies, often a result of being bullied themselves. Jimmy Mizen and Robert Knox stood up bravely to the bully, and they paid with their lives when other, less valiant individuals would have taken flight and survived.

Stabbings are a socially manifested result of the confidence and feeling of superiority that comes with carrying a weapon. Youths recognise they are beyond legal reproach (figures show that although 1,226 under-18s were arrested for possession in 2006, a meager 72 were arrested) and so they take this feeling of invincibility into other encounters. If they don't get what they feel they have a right to get, by virtue of being armed, they dispose of human life. This is not brave, this is not tragic, and it certainly not a result of social neglect. It is a result of a lack of disciplinary or pedagogical intervention with youths, or even a lack of individual motivation to accept such intervention.

If we can't generalise over the type of person who carries a knife, we can at least identify some possible reasons for such a widespread practice. Most young people are more inclined to carry a knife because, currently at least, the punishments for doing so do not amount to a sufficient deterrent.

Today's Guardian leader implies that knife carrying youths are "a monstrous by-product of mounting inequality". It is perfectly natural to feel revulsion and cowardice towards the individuals who have wronged you, but to equate those emotions with the wider public - and innocent bystanders - is hopelessly and needlessly wrong.

Listening to this, youths who stab lack structure, solace and solitude. Prison would give them that, but only if the government and their idiotic 'Children's Tsar' realise that stop and search, harder punitive measures and a zero-tolerance policy on carrying a weapon is not demonizing the guilty. It is preventing the innocent from victimhood.

The risk of causing offence should not come into the legislative opposition to knife crime. At an immediate legal level, carrying a knife should imply an intent to use it. Whilst it doesn't follow that if someone carries a knife they will inevitably use it, it is true that if they don't, they won't.

A government-funded report offers the earth-shattering insight that, "knife carrying can be a precursor to knife use in crime and is thus a matter for concern". Good. But then it goes on to deny the correlative link between carrying a knife and using one:

"knife carrying and knife use rarely result in stabbing".

The two are not mutually exclusive, and shouldn't be so in law. Murder charges are tough (some say) but to be caught carrying a knife and getting away with it only increases the likelihood of a knife being carried again, and then used.

But, as the Mayor is continually telling us, we need to tackle the causes of the problem, which surely means involvement and intervention much earlier in an individual's upbringing? Or at least an educational, community based initiative which extols the virtue of not taking a career in crime. It's foolish to deny that there are teenagers beaten, undernourished and abused in London. But it's also foolish to suggest that all of them turn to crime. It might help to show would be murderers that there are other routes of progression from a tough start in life.

In the sense of targeting causes, increased social and educational measures could be employed to inform youths that knives are not the inevitable consequence of any sort of toughness in early life, whether that be society's fault or not. A proactive - instead of a reactive - process of intervention would reverse the perception that society is always to blame and so should pay. It might be the case that society is doing enough to help youths, but too quietly and reactionarily.

I am not usually one to accept the intervention of the Government in personal lives. I'd argue you should be able to do more or less what you like, so long as nobody else is affected. It's selfish, but a ruling party cannot and should not aim to change a personality, only its social ramifications.

The Government is resisting pressure to be tougher on knife crime in a legal and absolutist sense. It doesn't sit well with calls from think tanks and charities who argue that these children who murder need love, not more negativity. Here arises a false dichotomy between preventative and reactionary discipline.

Were there powers to intervene much earlier in the downward spiral of an individual's development, it would be easier to wean them off the route of violence. In a similar way, if there were tougher powers to prevent the crime of carrying a weapon, we wouldn't need to worry ourselves with how we are going to punish or hope to prevent the murders they cause.

You can't expect every disaffected youth to be saved and turn away from crime. Nor can you sympathise with all knife-wielders as society's mistakes. Early governmental and social intervention might help ease the problem for future generations. In the immediate term, however, we need tougher action to prevent people carrying knives. If they don't carry one they can't use it, and then no-one gets murdered over a petty dispute. Now there's a novel idea.

Wednesday 21 May 2008

War Of Words




If you see me parading around my bedroom wearing an elaborately over sized pair of mirrored aviators, smoking a huge cigar and bedecked in camouflaged underwear, please don't be alarmed. This is merely my get-up for a new and noble campaign.

I hereby declare war on poor spelling, grammar and pronunciation. Such a triumvirate of enemies may seem insurmountable at a time when our brave, barrel-chested, lion-hearted armed forces are stretched to breaking point around the world. But I believe this is a just war, and a necessary one, especially considering how easy it is to win.

My opening skirmish is aimed at pronunciation. Pronunciation changes: from "Oh aye" in the North to "Ooh arr" in the South, people say things differently. Dialects are not just existent, they are desirable; their ingenuity perfectly exemplifies the malleability and adaptability of the Queen's English.

However, there are people out there who pronounce things wrongly, and I don't just mean the names of French wines on a Menu.

A friend of mine, who's surname is often party to a bit of mispronunciation, says 'Ya' instead of 'Yeah'. I know that 'yeah' is not a grammatically correct way of indicating the affirmative, but this little discrepancy, for me, may as well be a CIA torture technique. It makes him sound pretentious, something which he genuinely isn't. Whenever he does it - solely for the purpose of annoying me, I'm sure - I feel like punching him in the Adam's apple, before inviting him to repeat what he just said as he fights for his last wheezing breath.
My war's first operation could be some sort of real-time pronunciation penalisation system, wherein anybody who pronounces a word like a deaf Northern Irishman with a lisp is fined on the spot. Gordon Brown would be the first to empty his Murray Mint wrapper-lined pockets.

That man is impossibly bad at pronouncing words. During the last PMQs session, he insisted on pronouncing 'al Qaida' (or al Qaeda), 'al Keyada'. My reconnaissance suggests he does it deliberately; he not-so-subtly avoids sound bytes of him broaching salient topics by making up words, so he cannot be quoted as decisive. "Och nae," he could respond, "I said I didn't actually care about the 'poower', not the poor."

To add to Brown's idiosyncratic artillery, we have his pronunciations of 'Bournemouth' as 'Born Mouth', 'The Liberal Democrats' as 'The Lib'ral Partee', and 'Burma' as 'Mee-AN-mar'. At least Thatcher could still speak her way around that plum in her throat.

Next on the invasion and Clintonesque 'annihilation' list comes grammar. Poor grammar is extolled all around us. Round the corner is a greasy-spoon called 'Macs Cafe'. Who's? Assuming that it is, in fact, the property of Mac, (which I happen to know it is: he's Italian and can't be making a penny, but money laundering allegations will hardly reduce the price of my already-discounted bacon sandwiches) then surely an apostrophe should feature somewhere?

Rudimentary espionage work also points to a sign at Hammersmith Underground Station that reads: "Caution walk, don't run". That's not a sentence. The correlative link between two motional infinitives doesn't exist with the precursive 'caution', and so should not be clausally linked. It's an instruction, not an exercise in hypertaxis.
Misused apostrophes are the WMDs of the conflict - and they are spreading like anthrax. It seems that even
Britain's greatest minds cannot get it right.

Finally, the battle over superfluity. People, myself included, say phrases laced with superfluity all the time. Example: is it necessary to say "any time soon," given that all it really means is "soon"? The 'any time' is as redundant as a Northern Rock Cashier.
As Charlie Sheen taught us in
Hotshots, war can be funny. Similarly, the misuse of language need not always result in exasperation, as Lee and Herring masterfully demonstrate above.

During the long, dark nights of our final year at University, my roommate and I would eagerly anticipate the comic relief the latest issue of TCS would afford us - not for its woefully inane investigative journalism, but for Sarah Hope's column. She was a theatre 'critic', who simply could not speak English. I don't mean that in a Enoch Powell sense - she was English - but she still, at the age of 19, hadn't mastered even the rudiments of our language. Her mistakes were so numerous and her sentences so tautological that we would both end up in cramping fits of laughter, still in the dark as to what play she apparently sat through.

Her worst crime - one that made Slobodan Milosevic look like a Christian Aid worker - was her latent misuse of the word "literally". As in, "You could literally hear a pin drop," or "The audience literally exploded with laughter." The audience didn't explode. If they had, they may have created a a slightly more newsworthy article. They may have figuratively or metaphorically exploded, but not "literally". That's just silly.
There is no need for the word 'literally' to exist. You are either talking figuratively, - in which case its usage would be erroneous - or you are talking on the simple level of reality - in which case you don't need to say it at all; it's implied that you are talking on a literal level of occurrence, or else we'd all have to clarify after every sentence or observation that we weren't referring to a dream we had.

This might not be a grammar issue at all, but it is one which grates on me like a new pair of sandals.
As I put my feet up on my oak-panelled desk (before realising it's in fact a very uncomfortable way to sit) and sipped a victorious single-malt, reflecting on an effective campaign, I read
an article drenched in liquid irony about the correct usage of the much marginalised semicolon.

Bombarding a writer for succumbing to the kind of carelessness he is vilifying isn't a productive route to take (I refer the reader to the several mistakes they will doubtless spot during the course of this post). Sgt Sam Roberts tried to act as a bastion of pedantry and meticulousness, barricading himself against lazy writing and signing. The fact that ended up being killed in a friendly fire incident is by the by.

I shall return to England, not doubt to public antipathy on the grounds that no-one voted for the war, and pin a medal made out of a busted Blue Peter badge upon my gushingly proud lapel. There are no winners in war but, if I have managed to make just one person get their hyphens in the right gaps, I'll consider myself a victor.

Monday 19 May 2008

Appellation Contrôlée...

The other day, I did that thing that everyone has done, but no one dare admit, for fear of being labeled narcissistic. I Googled myself.

That's not entirely fair - I Googled the name of my blog in order to stimulate its appearance on the landing pages. Although from an outsider's perspective, it might appear as some form of digital self-gratitude, this actually serves a purpose, but there's no way I'll convince anyone of that - just as explaining you were trying to kill a spider that has crawled into your pants is not an oft-accepted excuse for getting caught interfering with yourself.

But I did it. And I came across a plethora of similarly wittily-entitled blogs. I had thought that the terrible pun I chose to splash across my blog's header was a tad too obvious to be unique, rather like claiming to have invented the question mark.

I found several blogs with a shared title, including 'Canada's number one equine-themed politics blog'. Such a dubious honour must be tongue-in-cheek; it's like me calling mine 'The world's number one blog written by a 21 year old named Patrick Galey with a small, egg-shaped birthmark above his right hip.' Which it is. Hopefully.

There's also something to do with wine. Why would wine-drinking enthusiasts feel compelled to use this name? Is it just that, like me, they have commandeered a pleasant sounding but essentially meaningless piece of aural manipulation?

There's a minimalist and unsettlingly neurotic blog. But not neurotic in a charmingly befuddled sense. This is what a stalker would write, if their preferred medium wasn't a letter handwritten in blood.

And then there is this. I wont patronise by saying it's actually quite entertaining but, since this blogger is clearly an enemy diametrically challenging my autonomy as a writer with a frivolous title, I would like to invite conjecture on the grounds that he lures children into his gingerbread house.


Given that it is nigh on impossible to copyright a title, authors often change them (or have them changed by judicious editors,) is my fixation on appellation a bit strong? Could I continue to write with any form of enthusiasm if my blog was called something even more cringe worthy, say "Write Of Way", "Just A Blog In The Machine" or "Raining @s and Blogs"?

The fact that I chose the title pun as an act of self-scrutinising metonymy, meditating on the repetitive and over-proliferated nature of regurgitative blogging will no doubt count for little in this battlefield of bad names. (That was going to be my sub-title, but I considered it a little less catchy, even though it was guaranteed to be peerless). I also wouldn't dream of being such a pillock as to suggest I named my blog for any reason other than it was the first thing that came to mind.

I am now faced with the dilemma of keeping my blog's somewhat obvious title and running the risk of having it submerged in a sea of retarded punctuation and bad poetry, or bowing to the draw of individualism and changing it.

Maybe in the choking smog being created by millions of bloggers, convinced that a) their opinion matters and b) anyone actually reads it, I'll have to make do with maintaining the 'number one blog called 'Blogging A Dead Horse''. Written by me, that is.

Tuesday 13 May 2008

Ad Nausuem




"OK, so we start with a close-up of the gorilla playing the drums-"
"Sorry, er...what?"
"The gorilla. Didn't... did you not get the fax I sent? With the script. The advert script?"
"What? Was that the one scrawled on the back of a Cutter's Choice packet? What has a gorilla playing the drums-"
"Actually it's a man in a gorilla suit."
"Whatever. What does it have to do with chocolate?"
"It doesn't have to have anything to do with chocolate John."
"Yeah John."
"Stay out of this."
"Sorry."

It was George Orwell, with one of his less pleasant images, who said 'Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.' It's testament to Orwell's sardonic grasp that such a bristling medium be described with so much opacity, but the great man's cynicism overlooked the trick that advertising is 'a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.' Thanks to the splendidly named Northrop Frye for that one.

Adverts either show you how you want to be, or how you could be with the advertised brand or service. They tell you you are intelligent and deserve to be entertained; cleverly cajoled into wanting merchandise. They must never assume to know more than you, like a precocious child, but appear as the friend who always bats off the ladies with his rippling, Tag-clad forearms: better than you, but not unattainably so.

There have always been good and bad adverts. What amazes me is how some companies can, in the quest for that perfect sales-pitch, produce adverts of such woeful inconsistency.

Cadbury, chocolate sellers since 1905, have an annual turnover the size of Chad and should be able to produce effective and (ideally) entertaining ads. And it has, on occasion. Indeed their drumming gorilla caused quite a stir (as it should; it's produced by Fallon Worldwide, the company behind the Sony Balls). It's even come up with its own in house advertising company, as if it's the paragon of innovative branding.

This comes from the same company that led a friend (not unaccompanied by a large percentage of Britain) to totally boycott Cadbury's chocolate in protest of the raging shitfest that was the 'Your Happiness Loves Cadbury' series. Such discrepancy shows how mercurial an art advertising is. One moment you're a genius for identifying a need the consumer didn't know they had with an image they would never have thought of, the next, you're singlehandedly boosting the national circulation of Mars Bars. The latest reel to be effortlessly tossed on Cadbury's 'miss' project pile should remind itself that it is selling a chocolate bar, not a cure for cancer.

It's true that strong bands can withstand bad ads. 'Why can't all the good things in life come without down sides? Like girlfriends, without the four-year plan. Or like bras, without the fumbling.' Or, indeed, like adverts, without typecasting the entire male demographic as skinny twenty something lads with straightened hair. The question is why they bother. If a product is good enough, or the brand sufficiently recognisable, there is little point in rehashing a trite and tenuous ad campaign.

There are some things that you never see advertised. Imagine a celebrity endorsed advert for pencils. It would be the worst advert since this pigswill. No one advertises apples, or ceilings. Tetrapak, the chairman of whom is the richest man in Britain, rarely need to force innovation in advertising. And they seem to be doing pretty well.

The hypocrisy of adverts can sometimes be arresting. As I write, a hook-nosed Gabby Logan is marauding a trolley down a Morrison's reduced to clear aisle, telling me how much she loves fending off tracksuited single mums during her weekly shop. Gabby Logan doesn't shop at Morrisons, nor do people who find the rugby-player felater palatable. Not even her servant shops in that dive. Equally, when pressed, executives do have a habit of producing (or plagiarising) toss.

The Peugeot 206 claims to be 'inspired by nature'. A car. Inspired by nature. In the same way that China's CO2 emissions are inspired by nature.

Adverts are getting more cinematic; more expensive. But they are not getting uniformly better. With increased budgets, one would hope to see increasingly effective ideas at work. One consistently brilliant company is Guinness, who must have a human-ideas juicing section to their factory on St Jame's Gate - disposing of young and promising media execs who have been lobotomized by Guinness' 'inspiration pump' in the murky green water of the Liffey.

The old 'ad'age that people don't buy a drill for the drill, but for the hole it creates should be born in mind when coming up with adverts. It would be nice to see a bit more parity between the product advertised and its advert's content. It would also be nice to never have to see Michael Winner on television again. But, you know what those ad executives say. Sex sells.

Friday 9 May 2008

Something God Only Knows...

Yesterday, the world's most Irishly named man, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, did a Rowan Williams and got his foot lodged clumsily in his mouth. Defending atheists (as if they are so beleaguered in this increasingly secular society) Mr Leprechaun O'Potato didn't stop short of having a very thinly-veiled dig.

In full-on patronising mode, O'Guinness outrageously claimed that atheism is just a "distorted kind of Christianity." In the same as Zoroastrians, who believe that when you die your soul is carried heavenward by scavenging birds, are really kind of Christians - they just don't know it.

Why do atheists need defending when there has been a 40% decline in the number of churchgoers within a generation? Surely it is Christians who need to defend their beliefs in a society increasingly adverse to outward displays of religiosity?

Graciously accepting your counterparts may well come across as inclusive and open-minded. In actual fact, the attempt by O'Fields of Athenry to show that he understands these godless masses only serves to show how woefully out of touch he is with society's spiritual health. Atheists are not really Christians, they have taken an informed (and invariably logical) decision to shun the belief in the existence of a higher being.

27% of people living in England (and Ireland) today are comfortable enough with these little, insignificant religious spasms to define themselves as Catholics. Cardinal Baileys is in a minority and, as such, doesn't get to speak on society's behalf any more.

O'Shergar has not only displayed a staggering amount of arrogance in his presumption that Catholicism is the only correct way of leading a spiritual life, he has also defeated his very argument that society needs to be more universally accepting of religion. You can't say, "We should all be free to express our beliefs," and then follow it up with, "As long as those beliefs match my own." You can't have your potato cake and eat it.

Thursday 8 May 2008

Something Bad Has Happened: Help Us!

Many Westerners awoke on Sunday to hear the news that Cyclone Nargis was threatening to empty their pockets of small change. The storm devastated villages across Burma's south coast and, at the time of writing, estimates of 100,000 dead are not being dismissed.

It put me in mind of Boxing Day 2004 when, like a lecherous uncle, a tsunami came over and ruined everyone's Christmas. This was followed in the space of a few months by George Bush's bothersome Hurricane Katrina (which I take to have had the best celebrity endorsement, thanks Kanye West) and the Kashmir Earthquake.

It seemed, for a few, desperate and increasingly foreboding weeks that the earth was about to implode in on itself.

But, thankfully, the four horsemen never materialised, we were not struck like stone by the sounding of the rapture and beleaguered office underlings didn't call up their arrogant bosses and tell them exactly where they can shove their filing jobs.

What did happen was a lot less spectacular. Aid agencies and charities applied delicate pressure on the public to give generously to those unfortunate souls caught in a natural disaster. These were victims not of human error or conflict, but of something that could only be put down to divine providence. These disasters could happen virtually anywhere in the world; it is a cruel irony that they normally seem to occur where inhabitants are already struggling to get by. Or, rather, these are the ones that dominate the pages of Western newspapers.

As I awoke to the news of the Cyclone, I couldn't help guessing how long it would be before I'd be asked to help.

Within hours the appeals were rolling in, telling us how bad we'd feel if we didn't send a nominal amount of aid ("for just 1p a year, you could stop this litter of babies from being eaten by their mother", that sort of thing.) I am not averse to giving to charitable causes, but charities have become rather presumptuous of late.

Firstly, we help already. European and American leaders have pledged to give between $4 and $10million of immediate aid to the victims in Burma. Where does that come from? Why us, of course. And we don't have a choice; taxation sees this process occur completely separate from individual motivation.

Secondly, people in the UK and other developed countries are beginning to feel the pinch, what with rising fuel/food/Heat! subscription costs. Research has proved that, as people find themselves with less disposable income, they begin to forget about charity. "I know there are people dying of thirst in Sudan, but I've just had to pay £1.68 for little Gregory's organic yoghurt," middle-class Mums can be heard pontificating at the checkout of their local Waitrose. "We've all got problems," they invariably add.

Thirdly, if people do give to charity, they usually like to see where their money is being spent, or they may as well throw their piggy bank into the local canal. Apparently, Donkey sanctuaries are receiving more money than many supporting abused women - much to the concern of many obtuse philanthropists. It's not that we wouldn't rather help a woman than a donkey, it's just that we would rather receive press-release emails of fluffy animals than healing black-eyes.

Charity is an essentially selfish pursuit. Yes, you are helping people (or donkeys) less fortunate than yourself, but your doing so makes you feel better. Go on. Admit it. To misquote Matt Le Blanc, "There's no such thing as a selfless good deed". We don't actually want to make a difference: if we did, we might do a little more than occasionally delving begrudgingly into our pockets and pulling out a crumpled fiver to assuage a street-stalking volunteer with green hair and a pierced lip. We'd do some research. We might volunteer to work for a charity, or even go there and get stuck into the problems ourselves.

But we don't care that much. Just so long as we can go home, complete with fully-laden shopping bags and know that we've given (not too) generously to those poor, starving, desperately ill donkeys- sorry, humans - we are able to derive smug pleasure from charity.

The final and most obvious problem with charities and their campaigns to stop us being such bilious, self-obsessive consumerist slugs ("just 2p will ensure that little Michael will grow up to be the chairman of a successful, multi-national manufacturing conglomerate. Otherwise, he will be raped.") and that's competition. If we donated to every charity who had a witty or affecting billboard campaign, we would very quickly be in need of aid ourselves. Natural disasters occur, crops fail, earthquakes happen and domestic violence abounds. As a giver to charity, you need to be able to prioritise.

This is no different to the way that charities and newspapers tend to prioritise various causes and not others. A cyclone in poor Burma is more newsworthy than the recent earthquake in affluent Japan. Columnists have been plumping the concept of overlooking politics in the name of a humanitarian effort, but what hope have they - or anyone else who doesn't happen to have the surname Militarycommanderofburma, for that matter - of getting through where it matters? Such comments are no doubt well-intentioned, but it is not the democratic and English speaking West who need to listen, it is Burma's own Junta. They listen about as well as a deaf pensioner wearing noise-canceling headphones.

Equally, governments will jump upon the chance to give to the Burmese authorities, as there is something in it for them. With Burma's autocratic rulers refusing to budge and overcome personal grudges to accept badly needed aid, Western governments can appear magnanimous whilst promoting their brand of democratic administration.

Not giving to charity doesn't make you a bad person, but this is what charities will make you like as they yank on your heartstrings like a kite in a storm. Neither does giving to charity make you any more of a good person. But, by God, you'll feel better.

So go and give that tramp round the corner some money just for sitting there. 50p should be just about enough to set him up in a basically-paid office job and see him work his way off the streets.

The first supplies of UN food aid are only now beginning to trickle through to Rangoon, five whole days after the disaster. That is not the kind of instant satisfaction I'm after from a charity. I'm off to save some donkeys.

Tuesday 6 May 2008

Some Things Are Hard To Find...

Bank holiday weekends normally follow a familiar pattern. They consist of an alcohol tinged cycle of replacement bus services, eight-hour marathon lunches with the in laws and unwittingly getting sunburnt. Their sole purpose - certainly for those unfortunate enough to inhabit that formless and unforgiving world of work - is to diminish the working week by 20%. For many, myself included, the best part of the Bank Holiday is going into work on Tuesday having already completed the worst day of the week.

This May Day however, I decided to throw caution and boredom to the wind in search of the best England's fecund rurality had to offer. Accompanied by my skeptical but ever-enthusiastic girlfriend, I trundled off to the Cambridgeshire village of Stilton to indulge in the perfectly idiosyncratic May Day tradition of cheese rolling. This basically involves some inebriated locals dressing up and embarrassing their children by competitively hurling replica Stilton's down a shallow slope. A simple premise, and one which was sure to reinforce the futility of doing anything whatsoever of consequence on a Bank Holiday.

The day was bright blue, the sun keenly getting back to work after its recent six-month sabbatical. We arrived at the village through a maze of incandescent yellow rapeseed fields and sinewy country paths, and were greeted by several excited residents, skins faded and bloated to resemble a family of boiled eggs, waddling to the centre of town where the frivolities were being nonchalantly set in motion.

The event itself was underwhelming; the highlight undoubtedly being the winning team of pock-marked teenagers, apparently in some sort of band. They were the kind of youths who are too big for their frames, and so are always awkwardly stooping, lanky arms stuffed in pockets like Rodney Trotter. In the ultimate competition of uncool, these beanpoles received some serious credibility damaging press as their prize of a whole Stilton cheese was drawlingly presented amid villagers' guttural cheers by a midget named Warwick.

Interspersed with some ferret-racing, maypole-dancing and general country knee-slapping, the festival for me represented a quintessential English fixation with tradition. Although the event itself is now redundant as a spectacle, it is the adherence to custom that brings people out into the glaring sunshine and draws them together as a hastily composed community.

Such a percievably anachronistic practice is bound to attract two kinds of reaction from city-dwellers. The first - and least condescending - is the view that such behavior from rural England is quaint, if not a little stagnant in terms of an event.

The second - and I would venture that many people secretly hold this point of view - sees such behaviour as a backwards, even toffish celebration of prosperous country folk; the villagers are so smugly content with a life free from hardship and fractiousness that they have the time to dick about with dairy products.

This goes hand in hand with the assumption that city life, due to its inherent industrial, technological and infrastructural proficiency, is slicker, quicker and hence more enlightened than the slow-paced countryside. Outgoing Mayor Ken Livingstone would periodically extol London's enviable 'multiculturalism', like an intermittent bout of populist wind. In London, where knife crime is soaring and different ethnic groups are becoming increasingly secularised, there seems to be little of the communal cohesion that any politician worth his salt will claim to believe in.

That is not to say that the villagers of Stilton finished the day's celebrations by holding hand and dancing peacefully round a campfire. There were still various and conflicting demographics at work and, in the balmy afternoon air awaft with hot dog smoke and candyfloss vapour, these seemed to concentrate to form a caricature of society. From my vantage point at the corner of the coconut shy, I could see single mothers struggling to shield their overweight babies from the sear of natural light. There were teenage pregnancies being paraded around with all the selfish abandon of a toddler giving her doll a haircut. There were binge-drinking and (shock and indeed horror) drug-taking teenagers dressed in their gravy stained tracksuits, causing trouble and giving some elderly residents light verbal intimidation. These crystallised fragments of society were all coexisting, but not in the Utopian sense of feeding one another grapes. They caused friction and argued, but made up without any aggression. There just wasn't any point in ruining a perfectly innocuous day. They lived together on an exceptional day, and they would have to live together in the quotidian ones that were to follow.

Villages and towns have identity, and it is an identity that their inhabitants can largely relate to. You are either born in or chose to move to a town or village, normally in search of a better quality of life. Few people who live in London originally come from London, and this, coupled with the poorly integrated native and immigrant populations make it difficult to see the capital as any one's spiritual home. What's more, those in power seem intent on pushing this panacea of multiculturalism to the annihilation of any sense of locality. If London represents the world - as it apparently should do - then where in the world do you come from? Community spirit is not sufficient motivation to get on with one another; there are enough other people around who you don't know, don't want to know, so why should you make an effort to get to know?

May Day celebrations such as in Stilton attest that, rurally at least, a great deal of national pride abounds alongside a sense of social cohesion. All classes, races and ages were in the village centre that day, no doubt the type of integration that many ministers claim to strive towards on a daily basis.

I fully realise that it is neither helpful or practical to compare a village with the country's most populous city, but part of the problem with London's divisiveness comes from it's own snobbishness and self importance. It is the biggest, arguably the best and that all too often precipitates its inhabitants into carrying with them a sense of superiority over their neighbour. Rather than sharing any common ground, Londoners prefer to keep it to themselves.

Stilton wasn't being backwards for rolling its eponymous produce. It was being progressive on a day of social inclusiveness and cohesion. London could do well from adopting the village's mentality of a sense of belonging - the fact that you have something in common with your neighbour, not through a shared skin colour, class or age, but simply by merit of them being your neighbour. They need to recognise that provincialism isn't parochialism.

With a full and happy weekend behind me I wearily boarded by replacement bus service back to the capital. As I alighted and set off down Blackstock Road to my house, I nearly inadvertently picked a fight with two separate men - just by looking at them. How foolish of me. How progressive and informed it is to insight rage through not looking sheepishly at the ground in response to a display of male brutishness. As I drudged home through the city of aggressive strangers, I missed the country, where I could look people in the eye without getting punched. How backward can you get?

Friday 2 May 2008

Something Not Worth Thinking About...

Forget Brown vs. Cameron, Red Ken vs. Snooty Lord Boris or even Obama vs. Hilary. May's real, almighty, life-altering tussle is between Leicester City and Southampton.

Both former Premier League clubs have fallen messily from grace and are teetering on the edge of oblivion, faced with relegation to League One and joining the ranks of fallen angels such as Leeds United and Nottingham Forest.

Southampton play Sheffield United at Home on Saturday, whereas Leicester take the bumpy, pottery-strewn A50 up to promotion candidates Stoke City. Should Southampton beat the Blades, Leicester could be faced with having to beat Stoke in order to send their newly-forged south coast rivals flailing toward eternal hellfire.

As a lifelong Leicester fan, I have endured my fair share of dizzying highs, terrifying lows and creamy in-betweens. I remember the heady days of Martin O'Neil, when we won the Milk/Worthington/Carling/League/Littler Cup not once, but twice at Wembley. I remember when giants such as Gerry Taggart and housewife's favourite Ian Walker stalked the earth. I remember when we were all but guaranteed a scrappy goal courtesy of players' wife-bothering Steve Walsh's hoofed clearance, a knock down header from 'heeeerrrrrrm' Ian Marshall and a well placed shin from workmanlike Steve 'Stevie' Claridge.

But those days are gone, possibly forever. I also remember the train-wreck that was Peter Taylor administration. I remember the time he set off on the over-night ferry to Nigeria in a van containing five-million pound coins and returned two days later with a scared-looking sprinter named Adi Akinbiyi. I remember when attempts to teach this plucky runner the rudiments of football failed spectacularly resulting in Leicester's elimination from the top tier.

I have long forsaken the pursuit of deriving any pleasure form supporting Leicester. I don't live there anymore and don't have the money (nor inclination) to clamber aboard a train to watch City lose every Saturday. Whenever I mistakenly tune into Final Score, only to see Leicester have pulled off another scrappy victory, I am not happy; Leicester should win away at Scunthorpe, but they shouldn't even be in the bloody division. To hear our manager, Ian 'Honest Ollie' Holloway spout in his West Country drawl how proud/heart-broken he is - the script alternates week on week - would be unspeakably depressing were I now not so perfectly apathetic to the fate of the club. Trust me, it's easier this way.

Play-Doh faced presenter Adrian Chiles, in his book We Don't Know What We're Doing, claims "It's not the fear, but the hope that destroys you." I have long since lost hope that Leicester can play a part in bringing joy to my life.

I have to say, living with two Manchester United fans doesn't help. My sister (born Leicester, raised Leicester) and her boyfriend (born Sydney, raised Wycombe) are forever donning their unmuddied red jerseys before settling down in front of a match and waiting to be entertained. Their idea of a bad season is one in which they just sneak the double on goal difference after having to penalties awarded against them in consecutive months. They cannot lose.

When Chelsea deservedly beat the Red Devils last weekend, Man Utd players fought with ground staff, fabricated racist provocations and kicked an innocent stewardess, leaving her with what is, on all accounts, a rather nasty bruise. It is no doubt to this bloody-minded allergy to losing that has got brandy-stained Alex and his merry band of millionaires so far in footballing terms. As respectable and graceful individuals, however, they lack humility like a best-in-show Toy Poodle.

My sole, insufficient and irksomely petty consolation is that, in the cosmically unlikely event that Leicester kick, claw and knee their way to victory at Stoke, they will send Southampton down.

I spent two years of my University life living with an avid Saints fan. We always used our mutual disappointment to comfort each other; together we were fans who, although consistently deflated, still harbored delusions that our clubs would claw back the bastions of defensive mundaness they once were. We convinced ourselves incessantly that our clubs were too good to be in the Championship.

Fissured by graduation and various commitments, our friendship is still haunted by the concept that this weekend, one of our clubs will prove too bad to play in the Championship.

So it comes down to the Stoke game, especially televised by Ruthless Rupert on Sky Sports in order to maximize potential grief. If Leicester win, and Southampton are relegated, I shall magnanimously call my friend and offer him the chance to switch his allegiance (and encyclopedic early-nineties team sheet knowledge) to the foxes. He will refuse, of course, but then proceed to get misty-eyed about how good Matt Le Tissier once was.

If however, the footballing gods fail to delivery favour upon Leicester and the racing certainty of our relegation is confirmed, I shall not gurn. I shall not throw myself to the floor and curse the day that Milan Mandaric ever considered hiring an Bristolian as manager who he thought was honest by virtue of his open and slightly sardonic accent. I probably won't even care.